April 30, 2026 – Sentora has announced that Sentora Smart Yield is now publicly available, opening access to its DeFi vault discovery and monitoring platform to all users.

As DeFi vaults become a core way capital moves onchain, Sentora is opening public access to the same research-led yield infrastructure it has used to support institutional deployments.

This comes as vaults have become a key part of DeFi infrastructure, and risk curators already account for nearly $7 billion in DeFi capital through curated vault structures.

The success of this model has been driven in large part by its ability to give users a simpler way to access onchain strategies while abstracting away much of the complexity of risk management.

With nearly $2 billion allocated across Sentora’s public vaults, the firm has become the largest public vault curator and works with key ecosystem partners such as Kraken, Upshift and Morpho.

Automated risk management, advanced strategy design and in-depth research have been central to Sentora’s rapid growth in this market segment.

The new platform means that the company is extending that same research-led framework to the public through a transparent, non-custodial interface built around strategy discovery, analytics and risk visibility.

Rather than functioning as another simple APY screen, Sentora Smart Yield is designed to help users understand the structure behind opportunities before they act.

Through the platform, users can compare vaults by asset, chain, strategy, APY, and risk metrics, while also reviewing how each vault is constructed. This is where capital is allocated and what exposures come with the strategy before interacting with the underlying vault contracts.

“Vaults are becoming one of the main ways capital is organized and deployed across DeFi, but most products still reduce that experience to a single number,” said Jesus Rodriguez, co-founder and CPO at Sentora.

“With Smart Yield, we’re bringing the same strategy framework we’ve built for institutional partners to the public, but in a format that gives users real transparency into how a vault works, where funds go and what risks they are taking before they deposit.”

Sentora Smart Yield also includes two core vault categories, Direct Vaults and Smart Vaults. Direct Vaults provide simpler, single-strategy exposure, typically through lending markets, and are designed to offer a cleaner, lower-complexity path to onchain yield.

Smart Vaults are more structured products that use multi-step capital deployment to pursue greater capital efficiency or enhanced returns through strategies, such as Supervised Loans and Leveraged Loops.

By making these strategies visible through a public dashboard, Sentora is bringing part of its more advanced institutional strategy set to a broader market for the first time.

In addition, each vault page includes analytics and monitoring tools designed to help users evaluate opportunities in greater detail.

These include historical yield behavior, TVL trends, liquidity conditions, withdrawal simulations, wallet concentration and strategy composition. 

For Smart Vaults, users can also view underlying deployments by protocol, blockchain and asset, giving them a clearer picture of how capital is allocated across the full strategy stack.

Sentora has also shared plans to bring DeFi Cover to all of its vaults, leveraging the Firelight protocol to add an additional protection layer for onchain asset deployments.

The result is a public product shaped by institutional requirements, not just access to DeFi yield but with the tools to assess it with greater discipline too.

As vaults continue to grow as an interface for onchain capital allocation, Sentora is positioning Smart Yield around a simple idea – yield discovery should come with structure, transparency and risk context, not just headline returns.

Sentora Smart Yield is available now at vaults.sentora.com.

About Sentora

Sentora is a DeFi infrastructure and strategy partner serving institutional and sophisticated onchain capital allocators. Through its research-led approach to vaults and private strategies, Sentora helps users and institutions access onchain yield opportunities with greater transparency into strategy design, capital allocation, and risk.

This publication is provided by the client. The text below is a paid press release that is not part of Cointelegraph.com independent editorial content. The text has undergone editorial review to ensure quality and relevance, it may not reflect the views and opinions of Cointelegraph.com. Readers are encouraged to conduct their own research before taking any actions related to the company. Disclosure.

Meta has begun paying select creators in USDC stablecoin on Solana and Polygon via Stripe, marking Facebook’s first crypto payout program four years after the company shut down its Libra project under regulatory pressure.

Meta USDC creator payouts went live on April 29 when the company quietly updated its support page to show that eligible creators in Colombia and the Philippines can now receive earnings in USDC on either Solana or Polygon. Yahoo Finance reported that Stripe, which acquired stablecoin infrastructure firm Bridge for $1.1 billion in late 2024, is the payments provider handling transactions and generating crypto-related tax documents for creators. Meta explicitly told reporters it is “not issuing a Meta stablecoin” and is instead using Circle’s USDC, the second-largest stablecoin by market cap.

As crypto.news reported, the rollout aligns with Meta’s plans disclosed in February to enter the stablecoin payments space through third-party infrastructure, with Stripe emerging as the leading partner after an RFP process. The choice of Solana is significant: Solana processes transactions in roughly 400 milliseconds with fees under $0.001, and as crypto.news documented, Circle minted over $10.5 billion USDC on Solana in a single month earlier in 2026, making it already the leading chain for USDC settlement volume ahead of Ethereum. Meta paid content creators nearly $3 billion in 2025, meaning even a partial conversion to stablecoin payouts would place meaningful volume onto Solana and Polygon.

The strategic context is the opposite of Libra. As crypto.news tracked, Meta’s 2019 Libra project failed because it tried to issue its own currency, control the wallet, and run the settlement network, giving regulators a single point to block. The 2026 approach makes Meta a customer rather than an issuer: Circle issues USDC, Stripe moves the money, and Solana and Polygon process the transactions. Meta provides the distribution through its more than 3 billion users across Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.

A Green Beret’s alleged $400,000 insider bet on a raid in Venezuela seemed like an isolated breach. A new report suggests it may be the visible edge of something broader.

The Anti-Corruption Data Collective (ACDC), a nonprofit research group, analyzed every settled Polymarket contract from January 2021 through mid-March 2026 — more than 435,000 markets and $54.4 billion in cumulative volume — and found that low-probability bets on military and defense outcomes win at rates that are difficult to explain through skill or luck.

Across political markets, such “longshot” bets typically succeed about 14% of the time. In military-linked contracts, success rates have topped 50% in some cases.

“Markets tied to specific government policies, such as military and defense and foreign affairs, are harder to forecast using public information alone,” the authors wrote, making them “more susceptible to information asymmetries,” including insider trading or specialized knowledge.

In those markets, the gap between informed and uninformed traders may be widest, creating conditions in which a small group can consistently outperform not just by reacting faster, but by knowing more.

For its part, Polymarket touts its market surveillance teams and cooperation with the Department of Justice on the Venezuela case. Trading on confidential knowledge is prohibited on the platform, as it is on Kalshi.

Concentrated profits

The ACDC report’s findings add to a growing body of research pointing in the same direction. A working paper from London Business School and Yale found that roughly 3% of traders account for most price discovery on Polymarket.

Separate analysis from blockchain analytics firm Solidus Labs showed that profits are even more concentrated, with fewer than 1% of wallets capturing about half of all gains. ACDC’s contribution is to suggest where some of that edge may come from.

The report examines the June 2025 U.S. strikes on Iran as a case study. Polymarket listed several date-specific contracts on whether a strike would occur. Markets tied to June 19 and June 20 expired without incident, and no longshot bets won.

The strike came at 18:40 ET on June 21. In the hours leading up to it, 19 longshot bets totaling $164,292 were placed across the contracts that ultimately resolved YES. Eight wallets shared about $1.8 million in profits, with one taking nearly $500,000.

The Pentagon had designed the operation to be unreadable from the outside, using decoy bombers and long-range stealth aircraft to avoid detection. Despite that, a small number of traders placed large, well-timed bets on the outcome.

The pattern extends beyond a single event. Across Polymarket’s military and defense category, the report found that in five of the six two-hour windows before market resolution, winning longshot bets outnumbered losing ones, contrary to what market prices imply.

Longshot bets can outperform for other reasons, including mispricing or shifts in public expectations. But the consistency of the patterns, especially in markets tied to military decisions, suggests that some participants may be operating with information advantages that others do not have.

ACDC, being a nonprofit research group funded through the Fund for Constitutional Government, has no surveillance product to sell, compared to Solidus Labs, whose own recent Polymarket analysis doubles as a marketing case for the platform it licenses to Kalshi.

ACDC’s recommendations include identity verification for bettors, conditional payouts on suspicious wagers, restrictions on markets whose outcomes are decided by small groups, and limits on how granular contracts can become.

The report’s conclusion goes further, calling for “an evidence-informed debate about whether the public should be betting on these outcomes at all.”

MARA Holdings (MARA) has agreed to buy Long Ridge Energy & Power in a deal valued at about $1.5 billion. MARA will also assume at least $785 million of debt backstopped by a bridge loan.

The seller, FTAI Infrastructure (FIP), is up 12% in pre-market trading. MARA is ahead 3%.

The deal includes Long Ridge’s 505-megawatt combined-cycle gas plant in Hannibal, Ohio, along with more than 1,600 acres of land, water access, fiber links, fuel supply and grid connections, according to a Thursday filing.

MARA said the site could support more than 1 gigawatt of total power capacity over time.

MARA said the acquisition would raise its owned-and-operated power capacity by about 65% and expand its operating and development pipeline to roughly 2.2 gigawatts across PJM, ERCOT, SPP and international markets.

MARA plans to start construction on an initial AI and critical IT buildout in the first half of 2027, with the first capacity targeted for mid-2028. The company said it does not expect to cut Long Ridge’s current power supply to the PJM grid.

The company expects the Long Ridge assets to add about $144 million of annualized adjusted EBITDA. The deal is expected to close in the second half of 2026.

North Korean government-backed hackers are becoming more sophisticated, more precise and now account for more than 76% or nearly $600 million in crypto losses this year alone.

The $285 Drift Protocol exploit, for example, involved what TRMLabs describes as a long and “unprecedented in-person social engineering” attack. It included months of in-person meetings between North Korean proxies and Drift employees.

“North Korean proxies sitting across a table from protocol employees over a period of months. That is, to my knowledge, unprecedented in North Korea’s crypto hacking campaign,” Ari Redbord, Global Head of Policy and Government Affairs at TRMLabs, told CoinDesk. “This is no longer just a remote keyboard operation.”

Ari’s comments accompany TRMLabs’ new report released Thursday, which highlights how North Korea’s two main hacking groups, DPRK and Lazarus, are responsible for 76% of all the crypto losses to hacks and exploits in 2026.

“What we are watching is not a North Korean campaign that is broader — it is one that is sharper,” Redbord said in the report. “North Korea is moving faster and more precisely than ever.”

“North Korea’s cumulative crypto theft now exceeds $6 billion attributed incidents since 2017,” TRM Labs’ report adds.

TRMLabs’ findings coincide with a Wasabi Protocol exploit using a similar playbook to Drift’s April 19 hack, where the assailants used a compromised deployer key with no timelock or multisig to drain $4.5 million.

The $292 million KelpDAO breach exploited a known single-verifier flaw that LayerZero had repeatedly warned against.

The playbook was vastly different from the Drift exploit, according to TRMLabs. Hackers converted the Drift proceeds to USDC, bridged to Ethereum, swapped into ETH, and have not moved them since the day of the theft, which is consistent with the DPRK’s patient, multi-year cashout pattern.

In contrast, Lazarus took their KelpDAO proceeds and immediately laundered them through THORChain and Umbra, which is handled almost entirely by Chinese intermediaries operating the well-documented TraderTraitor playbook, the report explains.

The Kelp DAO exploit triggered DeFi’s largest wipeouts as $13 billion exited several lending platforms, most notably, Aave’s, which lost $8.54 billion in deposits over 48 hours, leaving it with a nearly $200 bad-debt crisis, which industry participants are now helping it to alleviate with $300 million in pledges.

During the world’s largest Bitcoin conference, Ethereum NFTs have, ironically, provided one of only a few green shoots on red-filled crypto dashboards.

Bitcoin’s biggest annual conference opened on Monday in Las Vegas with bitcoin (BTC) above $78,600 and tens of thousands of attendees packing into the Venetian conference center to hear why it should be worth more.

Three days later, BTC was below $75,000.

Over the three-day conference, every top 10 digital asset was negative except for memecoin DOGE. Far lower down the leaderboard, however, Ethereum NFT collections from the 2021 bull run rallied.

Bored Ape Yacht Club climbed 17% over the past seven days, while its two derivatives, Mutant Ape Yacht Club and Bored Ape Kennel Club, rallied 25% and 53%, respectively. 

Pudgy Penguins added 15%, Azuki NFTs rallied 34%, Doodles gained 27%, and Clone X was up 16%.

The Bitcoin conference’s institutional speaker lineup, reportedly drawing more than 40,000 attendees across three days — even though many received free GA passes — was supposed to deliver a flurry of bullish headlines. Instead, it became a classic sell-the-news event.

Meanwhile, over on Bitcoin’s largest competitor Ethereum, five-year-old cartoon apes became one of the best-performing trades in crypto.

Read more: Pudgy Penguins PENGU token crashes at launch alongside NFTs

Percentage gains are easy from a low base

The reality, of course, is that the entire NFT market cap is now $1.9 billion, down from a peak exceeding $17 billion in April 2022.

So although NFTs have performed well over the last month, they’re still well beneath their previous highs.

Moreover, NFTs are now a thinly-traded asset class with high mark-to-market capitalizations that require very little purchases to move collection valuations substantially.

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Worse, wash trading accounts for roughly $24 million of the $48 million total NFT trading volume over the past week.

Indeed, the rally is almost purely a floor-price phenomenon that’s thinly justified by real purchases. Over the last 30 days on just $125 million of non-wash traded volume, including liquidations and sales at lower prices, the total market cap of NFTs has increased $480 million.

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• Real Finance, Wiener Privatbank partner for regulated blockchain access.
• EU-compliant framework enables institutional entry into on-chain markets.
• MVP targets $50 million, scaling to over $500 million tokenized assets in year one.

In a move that underscores the growing convergence between traditional finance and digital assets, Real Finance has announced a strategic partnership with Vienna-based Wiener Privatbank.

The partnership is to develop regulated infrastructure for institutional participation in blockchain-based financial markets.

The collaboration aims to create a framework that aligns blockchain innovation with established European regulatory standards, potentially opening new pathways for institutional capital to enter on-chain ecosystems.

Building a regulated gateway to on-chain markets

At the core of the partnership is the integration of traditional banking services with the REAL blockchain.

Wiener Privatbank will provide essential financial infrastructure, including custody of client funds, reserve safeguarding, and support for asset origination.

Client funds will be held in EU-regulated accounts, with compliance structured around frameworks such as MiCA, alongside standard know-your-customer (KYC) and anti-money laundering (AML) procedures.

The framework is designed to address key institutional concerns around legal clarity, operational transparency, and risk management.

By embedding these controls within the system, the partnership seeks to make blockchain-based financial products more accessible to regulated financial institutions that require robust compliance and governance standards.

Scaling tokenized assets within a controlled framework

The collaboration will begin with a minimum viable product (MVP) phase expected to support approximately $50 million in on-chain assets.

Following the launch of the REAL blockchain mainnet, the partners aim to scale significantly, targeting more than $500 million in tokenized assets within the first year.

Wiener Privatbank will also play a role in originating and structuring euro-denominated assets, contributing to liquidity development within what the companies describe as a regulated digital asset environment.

This focus on euro-based instruments reflects an effort to align blockchain offerings with the needs of European institutional investors.

Looking ahead, the companies plan to explore the issuance of a euro-denominated stablecoin native to the REAL blockchain.

However, this initiative remains subject to further regulatory assessment and structuring, indicating a cautious approach to compliance and oversight.

Aligning innovation with institutional standards

Executives from both organizations emphasized the importance of combining innovation with regulatory integrity.

Ivo Grigorov, CEO of Real Finance, said the partnership reflects a commitment to building infrastructure that meets institutional expectations.

This partnership reflects our commitment to building institutional-grade infrastructure that meets the expectations of regulated financial institutions. By working with Wiener Privatbank, we are ensuring that access to on-chain markets is underpinned by robust compliance standards, clear governance, and trusted banking relationships.

Michael Munterl, a member of the Executive Board at Wiener Privatbank, highlighted the shared focus on regulatory integrity and innovation.

Our collaboration with Real Finance is grounded in a shared focus on regulatory integrity and innovation. We see this partnership as an opportunity to extend established banking standards into emerging digital asset infrastructures, while maintaining the compliance, transparency, and client protection principles that define our institution.

The REAL blockchain itself is designed to support the tokenization and distribution of real-world assets within a controlled environment.

Through partnerships with regulated financial institutions, Real Finance aims to create infrastructure where traditional finance and blockchain systems can operate within clearly defined regulatory parameters.

On March 10, 2021, Strategy (formerly MicroStrategy) founder Michael Saylor encouraged investors to use leverage and even mortgage their homes to buy bitcoin (BTC). Five years later, the company’s CEO Phong Le is talking about mortgages again, but this time in relation to buying Stretch (STRC) instead of BTC.

Le talked about STRC, a stock with no guarantees of principal repayment that currently pays variable, 11.5% annualized dividends, on Natalie Brunell’s popular Bitcoin show.

“It almost looks like a paycheck, right? It’s just coming in,” Le claimed in an incredible comparison of income to STRC’s variable dividends that his board of directors may suspend at any time.

He also recommended STRC to people who “might have a mortgage to pay, or they might have utility bills to pay, or a car bill.”

Then came the incredible changeover from Saylor’s mortgage-for-BTC to CEO Le’s new mortgage-for-STRC. He told brunell:

“I, just last week, bought $250,000 of STRC. The reason I did it was just to sort of go through the experience, which I enjoy doing.

“I have monthly obligations. I have a 1.75% 30-year mortgage, right? And if I can, instead of paying down that mortgage, put it into an instrument that pays me 11.5%, that’s 10x my mortgage rate.

“I’m essentially making money by taking the money, putting it into STRC, getting 11.5% percent, and paying off my 1.75% mortgage.”

Le mortgages for STRC instead of BTC

In the same video, Le also claims that STRC “grew faster than the iPhone,” mistakenly claiming sales of its stock are somehow “revenue” growing faster than Apple’s early sales of physical products.

However, raising capital by selling stock doesn’t generate revenue, which is a controlled accounting term.

As with Saylor, the advice comes from a lavishly compensated executive who wants to “just sort of go through the experience.”

Like Saylor, Le doesn’t need dividends of a $250,000 mortgage relative to his annual compensation that has exceeded $15 million.

Le himself disclosed the uncomfortable reality of who’s receiving this mortgage advice. He recently admitted that roughly 80% of STRC stockholders are retail investors.

That figure, which he cited with apparent pride, means the population most exposed to financial hardship and chasing risky, high yields — as Le described, people with mortgages to pay, utility bills, and car payments — represents the overwhelming majority of STRC’s investor base.

Read more: Strategy could own more bitcoin than Satoshi by September

Unfortunately, Le didn’t highlight the language that Strategy itself places on its own STRC information page.

Cash dividends aren’t guaranteed, and STRC has no guarantee of principal repayment. The board can suspend payments at any time and adjust the dividend interest rate at will.

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Le compared STRC’s monthly dividend checks to a paycheck. However, unlike a dividend, a paycheck can’t be cancelled when things are going poorly at Strategy.

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• Nexo adds SOL, XRP to its 0% APR crypto-backed credit product.
• ZiC lets users borrow at 0% interest with no liquidation risk.
• Over 30% of Nexo loans now use non-BTC, ETH collateral.

Nexo has expanded its Zero-interest Credit (ZiC) offering to include Solana (SOL) and Ripple (XRP) as eligible collateral, marking what it says is an industry first for zero-interest, no-liquidation lending backed by these assets.

The move broadens access to interest-free borrowing beyond Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH), which previously dominated the platform’s collateral base.

The announcement comes as crypto-backed lending continues to evolve, with platforms seeking to attract a wider investor base by offering more flexible borrowing structures tied to digital assets.

Expansion beyond Bitcoin and Ethereum

Nexo said the addition of SOL and XRP reflects shifting collateral trends on its platform.

While Bitcoin and Ethereum still account for around 70% of total collateral volume—closely mirroring their broader market dominance—more than 30% of loans are now backed by alternative crypto assets.

SOL and XRP lead this segment, prompting the platform to extend its flagship ZiC product to these tokens.

The company said the move allows a broader group of users to access liquidity without selling their holdings.

“Nexo has always believed in being where the market is going, not where it already is. Zero-interest Credit set a new standard for Bitcoin and Ethereum holders, and expanding it to Solana and Ripple is the logical next step, one we are taking before anyone else,” said Elitsa Taskova, Chief Product Officer at Nexo.

How the zero-interest credit product works

ZiC enables users to borrow stablecoins at 0% APR over a fixed term, with no risk of forced liquidation during the loan period.

The structure includes predefined repayment terms visible at the outset, offering greater predictability compared to traditional crypto lending products.

For SOL and XRP-backed loans, ZiC operates at a 30% loan-to-value (LTV) ratio, with minimum collateral requirements set at 100 SOL or 5,000 XRP.

The core proposition remains unchanged: users can unlock liquidity while maintaining exposure to their crypto holdings.

The product has already seen notable traction. Nexo reported more than $170 million in total loan volume through ZiC, alongside a 66% borrower renewal rate and an average of four renewals per user.

More than half of the borrowed funds remain on the platform, indicating that users are leveraging liquidity while staying invested.

Growing relevance of crypto-backed lending

The expansion comes amid increasing recognition of crypto-collateralized financing in traditional financial systems.

In March 2026, US mortgage agency Fannie Mae began accepting crypto-backed mortgages, allowing borrowers to pledge Bitcoin without liquidating their assets.

Nexo positioned its ZiC offering within this broader trend, emphasizing demand for liquidity solutions that do not require asset sales.

The company said extending the product to SOL and XRP aligns with growing diversification in crypto portfolios and evolving borrower preferences.